Years before Edward Snowden provided documented proof that the National Security Agency was really a national insecurity agency as it was violating law and the US Constitution and spying indiscriminately on American citizens, William Binney, who designed and developed the NSA spy program revealed the illegal and unconstitutional spying. Binney turned whistleblower, because NSA was using the program to spy on Americans. As Binney was well known to the US Congress, he did not think he needed any NSA document to make his case. But what he found out was “Congress would never hear me because then they’d lose plausible deniability. That was really their key. They needed to have plausible deniability so they can continue this massive spying program because it gave them power over everybody in the world. Even the members of Congress had power against others [in Congress]; they had power on judges on the Supreme Court, the federal judges, all of them. That’s why they’re so afraid. Everybody’s afraid because all this data that’s about them, the central agencies — the intelligence agencies — they have it. And that’s why Senator Schumer warned President Trump earlier, a few months ago, that he shouldn’t attack the intelligence community because they’ve got six ways to Sunday to come at you. That’s because it’s like J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids. . . . it’s leverage against every member of parliament and every government in the world.”

To prevent whistle-blowing, NSA has “a program now called ‘see something, say something’ about your fellow workers. That’s what the Stasi did. That’s why I call [NSA] the new New Stasi Agency. They’re picking up all the techniques from the Stasi and the KGB and the Gestapo and the SS. They just aren’t getting violent yet that we know of — internally in the US, outside is another story.”

China’s notorious crackdown on internet activity has resulted in the arrest, imprisonment and interrogation of people posting over Twitter, according to the New York Times.

A growing number of users who have been using the blocked platform through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been swept up in a sharp escalation of Beijing’s censorship effort, as authorities tighten their grip over Chinese citizens’ online lives. There are an estimated 3.2 million Twitter users in China – or around 0.4 percent of those who use the internet.

“If we give up Twitter, we are losing one of our last places to speak,” said human-rights activist Wang Aizhong, who said the police told him to delete messages critical of the Chinese government.

When he wouldn’t, 3,000 of his tweets mysteriously disappeared.

Mr. Wang refused to take down his tweets. Then, one night last month while he was reading a book, his phone buzzed with text messages from Twitter that contained backup codes to his account.

An hour later, he said, 3,000 of his tweets had been deleted. He blamed government-affiliated hackers, although those who were responsible and the methods they used could not be independently confirmed. –NYT

Wang’s experience is far from unique – as The Times reports that one Twitter user spent 15 days in a detention center, another person had their family threatened, and “a third was chained to a chair for eight hours of interrogation.”

Beijing’s war against internet freedom reveals its vision of internet control over the user of social media – while the CHinese government has stepped up their demands that Google and Facebook take down content deemed offensive despite the fact that both companies’ sites are blocked in China.

The Yellow Vest movement is indeed spreading worldwide. In France, they are out destroying speed cameras. Most Americans are familiar only with the red light cameras that cities have been forced to take down for they are unconstitutional. That is why you did not get points for the violation, just penalties. In Europe, the speed cameras are outrageous. When I was living in Switzerland for a few months, boy did I get tickets galore. You suddenly find out that you get a ticket for just 1 km over the speed limit. In the States, a cop will not give you a ticket until you are more than 10 miles an hour over the limit. Your speedometer can be off as well as theirs. In Europe, there is no such recognition.

In Rome, just don’t bother even renting a car. All you will get are countless tickets as they change the speed limits at different times during the day and they will take a year to send you a ticket without any description of what the fine is even for. In Europe, these are just an excuse to impose more forms of taxes.

As government becomes ever increasingly desperate for money to pay their own pensions, we are headed into a clash that will be civil unrest on a global scale that will begin to rise much more dramatically after the turn in the ECN come January 2020. The polls show that the Yellow Vests Movement in France has 70% of the population behind them.

COMMENT: Hi,
Hunt for taxes is running full scale in Scandinavia.
In Sweden, all vehicles including foreign registered vehicles, are obliged to pay congestion taxes in Stockholm and Gothenburg as well as infrastructure charges in Motala and Sundsvall.
Sometimes, the automatic camera system reads the license plate falsely and few people in Finland have gotten monthly invoices, even though they or their car never were in Sweden, including some fire trucks that never leave their home town.
TThepayment is usually fa ew euros but the overdue payment is 500 SEK. The most horrible thing is that, of course, the due date comes so fast that if you don’t want to pay the 500 SEK overdue payment you just pay the invoice and then it is your burden to prove you never were in Sweden.
BR
JP

REPLY: We are witnessing police being converted into tax agents. This is no longer about protecting the public. It is about exploiting the public to fund government pensions. For every person who moves to retirement, the state then hires their replacement. Consequently, the cost of government is growing no exponentially on a global basis and this is the reason why we are undergoing a MAJOR Cycle Inversion in how the markets will react between now and 2032. In Australia, they have been handing out parking tickets in your own driveway. In Australia, there are people who have figured out how to beat all these automated cameras. They clone licenseplates so other people get the tickets. In the USA, there have been major class actions lawsuits against automated cameras. In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, if you stopped but were 6 inches over the white line, you were still being given a ticket for running a red light.

The media and the entertainment industry are focused on creating a consumerist-nationalist imaginary where shopping and waving the flag are effective daily remedies to ward off any uncomfortable existential doubts.

Both business and the nation still reign in the hearts and minds of millions as the “true Gods”.

The revolution of the “multitude” is far, far away.

Empire, American Empire, is neither setting, fading, or waning. On the contrary, its tentacles stretch throughout every conceivable path and production of biopower.

The expansion of American power that began in earnest after the Great War has continued unabated.

The world is more American now than it has ever been.

Surgically, America through its unrivaled mastery of technology, organization, and capital can pick and choose the actors and actions it wills to manipulate or eliminate.

American global networks of surveillance and suppression have grown and deepened. The threat of world revolution and terror are convenient stories to both mobilize and mesmerize the multitude.

A Hitler and/or a Bin-Laden will always conveniently appear when needed.

Consumption, in all its forms, is the only ideology and it is highly effective since it is based on basic biological processes. The pleasure centers of the brain have lent themselves to the construction of a life of bodily gratification. Thus the ideological celebration of the body has become the new ideological prison of the mind. Nietzsche’s “last man” is the middling subject of our present day totalitarianism.

In a world where pesky drones are becoming an increasingly greater nuisance – see the embarrassment that was last week’s Gatwick airport shutdown– the NYPD is taking the other side and is ramping up security for the city’s annual New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square with more than 1,200 cameras — some installed on high-flying drones — to protect the nearly 2 million expected revelers, police officials said Friday.

One of the camera-equipped drones will be tethered to the top of a building to prevent potential attacks on the party below, Police Commissioner James O’Neill said at a press conference quoted by the NY Post.

“This is the first time we’re going to be using it at a large-scale event,” he said. “It’s just going to give us an additional view of the crowd.”

Bloomberg reports that the drones are being put in place in an attempt to prevent another incident like the shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, in which 59 people who were attending an outdoor concert were killed by a sniper located in a hotel room overlooking the Vegas strip.

What about bystanders who decide to bring one of their own drones? That would be a bad idea because counter-terrorism cops will also deploy counter-drone technology to protect against attackers, or anyone else for that matter, with anyone caught flying a drone likely to be arrested.

“Don’t fly a drone that night… There’s no need to fly a drone,” O’Neill said. “And if you do fly one, there’s a good chance you’ll end up getting arrested.”

Bezos poised to become knower of all things, with strategic moves to collect info on individuals inside and out.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it,” came a warning from George Orwell’s novel, 1984, that is rapidly, wickedly, becoming prophecy with new Amazon eye-in-the- sky technology and a dark and disturbing twist. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is poking that eye with a sharp stick.

And Jeff Bezos is not feeling the love.

In what appears to be Bezos’s latest strategic move in the quest to replace God as knower of all things is a hybrid monster of facial recognition software and a doorbell camera widget manufactured by Ring, a company that Amazon bought earlier this year.

In a gross assault on the right to privacy, a patent filed months ago essentially describes a product that captures information on people who as much as walk past a doorbell, sending real-time information to police databases. It also will allow customers the ability to upload to law enforcement photos of anyone they deem might be a sketchy individual.

What does a non-sketchy, normal person wear when ringing a doorbell?

Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney for the ACLU, is fired up and fighting:

“It’s rare for patent applications to lay out, in such nightmarish detail, the world a company wants to bring about. Amazon is dreaming of a dangerous future … ”

Or perhaps Bezos dreams of ruling the world.

Biometrics Bastardization

But attaining an unlimited collection of facial snapshots is just the beginning. A deeper dive into the patent application reveals that Amazon is prepping to expand its unlimited munitions stash of photos with other biometrics. And what it plans to extract from unsuspecting folks will horrify freedom-loving Americans.

Another week has gone by where we have seen a tremendous amount of activity around the world: the French, Belgians, and Dutch are engaged in protests labeled “yellow vest” protests. In actuality, the yellow vests are insignificant: these Euro-Socialist countries require citizens to wear yellow vests in public for protests…for “safety” reasons. Actually it is so that center mass is easier to acquire by their paramilitary police forces. There is a good possibility of a major war escalating from current problems between Ukraine and the separatist provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. The U.S. phony economy is not doing well.

Quietly and almost unnoticed by the beeves of the American populace are the biometric measures for surveillance and tracking being emplaced by the United States with the cooperation of major corporations. I have written articles on the biometric scanners being used in an Atlanta airport, and that Chicago is following suit, along with Delta using these biometric data collection scanners prior to boarding flights in Los Angeles.

Though DNA has revolutionized modern crime fighting, the clues it may hold are not revealed quickly. Samples of saliva, or skin, or semen are sent to a crime lab by car (or mail), and then chemists get to work. Detectives are accustomed to waiting days or weeks, or longer, for the results. Some labs are so backed up, they take only the most serious crimes. Some samples are never tested.

I have been following the scandal of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act(also known as the Snoopers’ Charter) and Holland’s Sleepwet and their relationship to the encroaching government powers over private data, privacy, data collection, surveillance, and free speech for several years now.And very much related to these bills created ostensibly to protest us from “terrorism,” is Google’s encroaching powers over our lives, to include the freedom of expression protected by most national laws, not to mention EU and UN Charters, around the planet today.

When the Internet became a tool for communication and research in the late1980s (usually through universities and research institutes) and later rrendered public through commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) in 1991, most people were slow to catch on. Initially, I was inculcated into Internet culture by virtue of being a graduate student at New York University where I came to depend on their computer labs to churn out papers when not using friends’ computers. I still remember Archie, Telnet, and line mode browsers before the release of ViolaWWW.By the mid 1990s students were curious about hypertext through Memex and Xanada while many others made their personal webpage which they would write in html with the help of on- or off-line instructions.The concept of a free website builder had not yet emerged and everything was very much ad hoc, individuals figuring out how to fiddle with html as if a late 20th century Mini Cooper under whose hood the user would play around.And yes, the flashing bright lights that every webpage seemed to embrace as if a will to trigger everyone visiting their page an epileptic seizure.

When it comes to the relationship of U.S. citizens to the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C., there’s no indication that anything remotely resembling self-government is happening. Rather, the relationship is far more like that of a servant to a master.

The gilets jaunes, or “yellow vests” protests, emerged seemingly out of nowhere about a month ago and have in a few short weeks shaken the French political power structure to its core. Just yesterday, the exceedingly unpopular President Macron cried uncle and offered a series of concessions to the protesters. Many commentators have come to the simplistic and erroneous conclusion that violence works, but it wasn’t the burning cars or streets filled with tear gas that really scared Macron and the people around him. It was something much deeper than that.

First, powerful elites tend to be control freaks. Abuse of the law, institutionalized corruption and invasive surveillance typically make the powerful feel comfortable their position is secure. What really makes them shake is when something totally unexpected happens — and the virality and force of the gilets jaunes movement caught them off guard.

Second, the diverse, nebulous and leaderless nature of the participants and their grievances made it a difficult narrative to counter through the media or government spokespeople. It wasn’t masterminded by dissident political parties or even France’s activist unions. Though it was catalyzed by rising taxes on diesel fuel, it quickly became a rallying point for a hodgepodge of individuals with a variety of serious gripes against Macron and his neoliberal policies.

Although giving up your data was once an afterthought when gaining access to the newest internet services such as Facebook and Uber, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, many people have had their perspective altered by various recent scandals, billions of dollars of cybertheft, and a growing discomfort around how their personal data may be used in the future.

More people want to opt out of this data collection, but aside from disconnecting entirely or taking ludicrous measures to safeguard information, there aren’t many great options available to limit what is seen and known about you online.

THE NEXT BEST THING

It may not be realistic to use Tor for all online browsing, so why not instead look at taking more practical steps to reducing your internet footprint?

Today’s infographic comes to us from CashNetUSA, and it gives a step-by-step guide – that anyone can follow – to limit the amount of personal data that gets collected on the internet.

RT reported that the UK’s so-called “National Data Analytics Solution” will see an algorithm process whichever of 30 separate data points have been recorded about a person in local and national police databases in order to predict which members of the population are most likely to commit a crime or be victimized by one, after which the state will dispatch local health and social workers to offer “counseling” to them in an attempt to prevent the computer’s envisioned scenario from transpiring. This program is being likened to the 2002 film “Minority Report” and carries with it a vibe of China’s controversial “social credit” system, albeit without any “rewards” being offered for law-abiding behavior. In fact, one can actually make the claim that instead of the UK copying China to a degree, it was actually China that learned from the UK seeing as how the island nation’s mass surveillance system used to befar ahead of the communist nation’s one.

The problem with “pre-crime” technology, however, is that it straddles the fine line between security and liberty in what is supposed to be a “democracy”, therefore making it uncomfortably out of place in the UK while being much more natural to implement in centrally controlled societies like China’s. While the European country insincerely pretends to be a “democracy” in the Western sense of how this system is commonly assumed to function, the East Asian one makes no such pretenses and is proud of having a different organizational model, which should be doubly disturbing for any British citizen because it means that their “democratically elected government” is actually less forthcoming about its nationwide surveillance strategy than comparatively more centralized China’s is. No value judgement is being made about either country’s governing system, but the purpose of this comparison is to point out the surprising similarities between the two that are usually lost on most observers.

They are transforming the Internet into the greatest tool of surveillance that humanity has ever seen, and if we stay on the road that we are currently on it is only a matter of time until our society becomes a hellish dystopian nightmare. I wish that this was an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Over the past couple of decades, the Internet has completely changed the way that we all communicate with one another. At one time, all forms of mass communication were tightly controlled by the elite, but the Internet suddenly allowed us to communicate with one another on a massive scale without having to go through their gatekeepers. This radically altered the landscape, and at first the elite were unsure of how to respond to this growing threat. There was no way that they could roll back time to an era before the Internet was invented, and so they have decided to use it for their own insidious purposes instead.

Today, the Internet has become the centerpiece of their “Big Brother surveillance grid”, and they are gathering information on all of us on a scale that has never been seen before in all of human history. But of course it was never going to stop there. Over the past couple of years we have started to watch the elite use all of this information to punish those that are doing or saying things that they do not like.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon is what is going on in China. The following comes from BuzzFeed…

BriefCam’s “Transforming Video into Actionable Intelligence” allows law enforcement and retailers to secretly identify people by their gender, body size, color, direction, speed and more.

BriefCam’s Video Synopsis version V allows police and retail stores to use surveillance cameras to identify individuals and cars in real-time.

BriefCam is the industry’s leading provider of Video Synopsis® solutions for rapid video review and search, real-time alerting and quantitative video insights. By transforming raw video into actionable intelligence. (Source)

What is really disturbing about the video, is no one knows where it is being used and by whom. BriefCam’s limited disclosures claim it is being used by top law enforcement agencies and governments, but that’s it.

NEC’s NeoFace Watch software is being showcased at the International Security Expo 2018. NEC admits facial recognition is integral to smart cities.

NEC and NPS will showcase a vast range of safety solutions to overcome challenges facing cities; including facial recognition system, automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), CONNECT police platform, and video analytics solution. The solutions will form part of Safer Cities that NEC and NPS aim to build, to contribute to realize a safe and secure society for all citizens.

BriefCam, like NEC, is so good at spying on everyone that even Homeland Security is impressed.

Aaron Miller, Director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for the City of New Orleans said:

Say the wrong things and you might get kicked off of your favorite social media platform.

Tech titans Apple, Facebook, and YouTube have wiped out talk-show host Alex Jones’s social media presence on the Internet. But the social media crusades weren’t over.

Facebook recently took down popular pages like Liberty Memes and hundreds of other prominent libertarian-leaning pages. In the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, social media network Gab was on the receiving end of suspensions from payment processors like PayPal and Stripe and cloud hosting company Joyent. Although these companies did not provide clear explanations for their dissociation with Gab, the media had a field day when they learned that the synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers, had an account with the social media network.

Should libertarians fear social media de-platforming? Or is this a case of private actors exercising their legitimate property rights by excluding those they wish to no longer do business with?

The Blurring Lines of the Public & Private Sector

Since the question of de-platforming has popped up, some conservatives have proposed state-based solutions to solve this problem. In a role reversal, conservative commentator Ann Coulter suggested that the government pass anti-discrimination laws to prevent social media platforms from de-platforming conservatives. Ideological consistency is a lot to ask for from seasoned veterans of Conservative Inc these days.

Nevertheless, Coulter expanded on why the 1st Amendment protections must be extended to social media:

We need to apply the First Amendment to social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, because it is a public square, and there is precedent for that and it’s gotta be done, because this is really terrifying, and talk about chilling speech when they’re just throwing people off right and left.